Fake shops are making a killing from counterfeit trainers
29th June, 2020
Online shopping has surged since lockdown started in March. Many of us, looking to be healthier, have headed online for sports equipment and a number of sportswear retailers have reported booming online sales. John Lewis recorded a 72% increase in total sports shoe sales, while Adidas and Puma have both seen an increase in ecommerce revenue.
Shoppers browsing online for the best deals, however, need to take care, as many people would be surprised at the scale of fake shops. Each day we find new fake shops designed to entice shoppers away from bona fide outlets, as many brands have yet to find effective countermeasures.
Counterfeit shoes, clothing and other accessories are estimated to lose the industry more than €26 billion each year in the EU alone, while the loss due to all online counterfeiting is estimated at $323 billion a year. The OECD estimated that over 3% of all imports worldwide are counterfeit.
Traditionally fake shops claim to sell luxury consumer goods at highly discounted prices. We have seen fake shops using at least three different models:
- Payment is accepted, but no goods are delivered.
- At the end of the checkout process, an error message is displayed such as “Out of Stock” and no transaction occurs. This is equivalent to a phishing attack, as the fake shop has the consumer’s credentials.
- Payment is accepted, and goods are delivered. The quality of goods varies between junk and identical to the bona fide item.
Trainers are the most counterfeited goods
We currently block around 75,000 fake shops in our extension and apps. Of these, roughly half target a specific brand, such as Nike or Adidas. About 70% of the fake shops selling branded goods sell shoes, predominantly trainers.
Corroborating this, European customs authorities handle more cases of counterfeit sports shoes than any other type of product.
Fake shops by type of goods sold
June 2020 Web Server Survey
25th June, 2020
In the June 2020 survey we received responses from 1,224,760,416 sites across 262,406,750 unique domains and 10,042,047 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 1.21 million domains and 149,000 computers, but a loss of 13.3 million sites.
Microsoft lost the largest number of sites – more than 20 million – taking its total down by 13% to 135 million. This has decreased its market share by 1.51 percentage points to 11.0%. Apache also suffered a sizable loss of 10.7 million sites, decreasing its total to 304 million and taking its share down by 0.60 points to 24.8%.
nginx continues to lead with a total of 449 million sites, an increase of 2.95 million since last month. Coupled with the other major vendors' losses, this has increased nginx's market share by 0.63 points to 36.6%.
nginx also showed the largest computer growth, with 115,000 more computers taking its total up to 3.35 million and putting it only 76,000 computers away from Apache's leading total.
While nginx looks set to soon become the largest vendor in terms of computers – possibly even by next month – celebrations by F5 Networks are likely to be marred by the latest developments in the dispute over the ownership of the nginx web server source code: it is now being sued by Lynwood Investments, who claim it owns the software.
The latest move comes after police raids on the offices of nginx and the home of one of its co-founders, Igor Sysoev, in December 2019. Russian search engine and e-commerce service provider, Rambler, alleged the webserver was developed while Igor Sysoev was a Rambler employee. Rambler transferred the rights to pursue the dispute to Lynwood Investments.
Meanwhile, nginx has also extended its recent new lead in the domains metric, with it now being used to host sites across 1.82 million more domains than last month.
Google was the only major vendor to gain active sites this month – a 2.12% increase to 19.3 million – and LiteSpeed was the only one to increase its presence among the top million websites, where it now has a share of 1.92%.
New vendor releases
nginx 1.19.0 mainline was announced on 26 May. This first release in the 1.19.* stream adds client certificate validation with OCSP, as well as a few bug fixes. The latest stable version is still 1.18.0, which was released in April. The difference between these two release streams is that the mainline branch is where new features are added, while the stable branches receive only security and bug fixes. This gives the stable releases a fixed feature set, which increases compatibility with third-party modules.
| Developer | May 2020 | Percent | June 2020 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nginx | 445,724,550 | 36.00% | 448,673,487 | 36.63% | 0.63 |
| Apache | 315,019,262 | 25.45% | 304,288,405 | 24.84% | -0.60 |
| Microsoft | 155,042,311 | 12.52% | 134,874,928 | 11.01% | -1.51 |
| 44,304,867 | 3.58% | 43,449,240 | 3.55% | -0.03 |
Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in May 2020
2nd June, 2020
| Rank | Performance Graph | OS | Outage hh:mm:ss |
Failed Req% |
DNS | Connect | First byte |
Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | EveryCity | SmartOS | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.208 | 0.083 | 0.165 | 0.165 |
| 2 | www.flexential.com | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.237 | 0.090 | 0.179 | 0.179 |
| 3 | Webair | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.281 | 0.073 | 0.147 | 0.147 |
| 4 | ServerStack | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.201 | 0.086 | 0.171 | 0.171 |
| 5 | www.choopa.com | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.010 | 0.203 | 0.004 | 0.021 | 0.021 |
| 6 | Hyve Managed Hosting | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.010 | 0.139 | 0.074 | 0.148 | 0.148 |
| 7 | CWCS Managed Hosting | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.010 | 0.280 | 0.080 | 0.163 | 0.163 |
| 8 | GoDaddy.com Inc | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.014 | 0.371 | 0.006 | 0.033 | 0.035 |
| 9 | Rackspace | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.014 | 0.430 | 0.013 | 0.027 | 0.028 |
| 10 | Pair Networks | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.014 | 0.320 | 0.101 | 0.201 | 0.201 |
In May 2020 EveryCity had the most reliable hosting company site, responding to all of Netcraft's requests with an average connection time of 83ms. For the past nine months EveryCity has appeared in the top 10 most reliable hosting company sites. EveryCity offers cloud hosting solutions and managed third-party services, with its primary data centre located in the heart of London.
May 2020 Web Server Survey
26th May, 2020
In the May 2020 survey we received responses from 1,238,024,212 sites across 261,192,350 unique domains and 9,892,834 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 224,000 computers and 1.10 million domains, but a loss of 8.10 million sites.
nginx lost the greatest number of sites, with 14.2 million fewer than in April, but conversely had by far the greatest increases in unique domain names (+1.50 million, +2.02%), and web-facing computers (+137,000, +4.43%) this month. OpenResty, which is based on nginx, also saw a large 237,000 domain count increase to reach 7.15 million – the second largest increase in domains for any vendor this month.
Apache had losses in most metrics, dropping 244,000 domains. It did, however, come away with 6.88 million more sites and 45,000 more computers this month than last. Apache still leads in the active sites, computers, and top one million sites metrics.
Microsoft lost out on all metrics this month, dropping by 5.08 million sites and 175,000 unique domains. Both Apache and Microsoft have been on slow long-term downward trends in most metrics. Although they have both increased their count of web-facing computers over time, nginx has seen much stronger growth in comparison. Despite running on a 17.9% share of domain names and 16.4% share of computers, Microsoft holds a much smaller 4.72% share of active sites.
LiteSpeed currently serves 4.20 million domains, giving it a 1.61% market share. It has a slightly higher 1.88% share amongst the top one million sites. LiteSpeed has seen consistent growth, and has had a 23.3% domain count growth over the last 12 months.
Vendor News
Nginx released a new stable version of the nginx web server. nginx version 1.18.0 incorporates additional features which have been introduced in the mainline 1.17.x nginx versions over time. Nginx also released version 1.17.0 of the Nginx Unit application server.
LiteSpeed released new 1.6.13 and 1.7.1 versions of their OpenLiteSpeed web server, introducing bug fixes, security features, updates from their LSQUIC library, CentOS 8 support, and more.
| Developer | April 2020 | Percent | May 2020 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nginx | 459,886,788 | 36.91% | 445,724,550 | 36.00% | -0.90 |
| Apache | 308,143,708 | 24.73% | 315,019,262 | 25.45% | 0.72 |
| Microsoft | 160,121,865 | 12.85% | 155,042,311 | 12.52% | -0.33 |
| 42,648,748 | 3.42% | 44,304,867 | 3.58% | 0.16 |
Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in April 2020
1st May, 2020
| Rank | Performance Graph | OS | Outage hh:mm:ss |
Failed Req% |
DNS | Connect | First byte |
Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | GoDaddy.com Inc | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.378 | 0.008 | 0.033 | 0.035 |
| 2 | New York Internet (NYI) | FreeBSD | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.519 | 0.054 | 0.109 | 0.109 |
| 3 | Webair | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.286 | 0.071 | 0.142 | 0.143 |
| 4 | Swishmail | FreeBSD | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.207 | 0.083 | 0.165 | 0.165 |
| 5 | Pair Networks | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.000 | 0.322 | 0.098 | 0.195 | 0.195 |
| 6 | Hyve Managed Hosting | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.144 | 0.077 | 0.154 | 0.154 |
| 7 | EveryCity | SmartOS | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.208 | 0.079 | 0.157 | 0.157 |
| 8 | CWCS Managed Hosting | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.286 | 0.080 | 0.162 | 0.162 |
| 9 | ServerStack | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.234 | 0.084 | 0.167 | 0.168 |
| 10 | krystal.uk | Linux | 0:00:00 | 0.005 | 0.314 | 0.095 | 0.189 | 0.189 |
GoDaddy had the most reliable hosting company site in April 2020. This is the second consecutive month that GoDaddy has had the most reliable hosting company site and GoDaddy has not appeared outside the top two so far in 2020. GoDaddy provides tools that help businesses create a web presence and has provided ideas for small businesses to cope through the COVID-19 pandemic.
All of the monitored hosting providers are continuing to provide their services despite the challenges introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The next four hosting company sites in the top 10 also responded to all of Netcraft's requests in April: New York Internet, Webair, Swishmail, and Pair Networks. The top five hosting company sites were separated by average connection time.
New York Internet has published a COVID-19 Preparedness Plan to demonstrate how it is helping provide services to its customers throughout these uncertain times. In New York, Webair has donated meals and personal protective equipment to frontline workers.
Netcraft wins 2020 Queen's Award for Enterprise
21st April, 2020
Netcraft has today received a Double Queen’s Award for Enterprise.
A Queen’s Award is the highest UK Government award for a British business. It is awarded on the Queen’s Birthday each year, and, in different times, it would include an invitation to a mass gathering at Buckingham Palace. The criteria set by our Government searches for considerable progress sustained over a six year period. This year, 128 companies received a Queen’s Award for International Trade and 66 companies a Queen’s Award for Innovation.
Netcraft is one of three companies to receive a Queen’s Award in both categories. The full list of winners is listed in the Queen’s Awards Press Book.